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Rough Justice

You can usually count on three things in a Louise Erdrich novel. One: the tale will be told by many characters, each with his or her own chapter or three. Erdrich established this pass-the-talking-stick style in early novels like “Love Medicine” and “The Beet Queen.” It’s served her well, and she’s staying with it. Two: although these narrators differ in age, perspective, gender and disposition, they will share an uncannily similar voice, hushed and deeply observant. Erdrich’s characters have rich inner lives, expressed in language that’s often achingly poetic but can sometimes resemble a John Mayer lyric. (“I was everything the mountain knew.”) This is Erdrich, take her or leave her. Third: there will be Indians, there will be white folks, and there will be tension between the two.

In “The Plague of Doves,” Erdrich returns to familiar territory, the stark plains of North Dakota, where the little town of Pluto sits beside rusting railroad tracks, slowly dying. What’s killing it? Old grudges, lack of opportunity, long-haul trucking, modernity itself. A civic-wide aversion to ambition doesn’t help. “We are a tribe of office workers, bank tellers, book readers and bureaucrats,” says Evelina, the quiet part-Ojibwa girl who anchors the novel.

Don’t let Evelina fool you. Pluto’s modest citizens live lives of quiet rectitude punctuated by outbursts of lust and crime, the one often precipitating the other. These folks don’t need closets to hold their skeletons, they need storage units. Not that carnal desire and embezzlement — and kidnapping and vigilante murder and sweet-justice murder and death by bee sting — are such bad things, but the people of Pluto wear the history of these acts like heavy overcoats. They can’t escape their own past, or their grandfathers’ past. No wonder the kids are high-tailing it for the bright lights of Fargo.

The tension between Indians and whites in “The Plague of Doves” is both historical and geographical. Pluto is next to the reservation, and some say the town fathers stole tribal land. That’s minor, though, compared with the real stain on Pluto’s reputation: “In 1911, five members of a family — parents, a teenage girl, and an 8- and a 4-year-old boy — were murdered,” one of the narrators recalls. “In the heat of things, a group of men ran down a party of Indians and what occurred was a shameful piece of what was called at the time ‘rough justice.’” The lynched Indians’ only crime was having the misfortune to discover the murder victims. Since then, the vigilantes and their descendants have done their best to forget the incident. “The town,” we are told, “avoids all mention.”

Photo

Louise ErdrichCredit
Persia Erdrich

That’s not to say the past is past. The novel opens with Evelina, a sixth grader, managing successive crushes on Corwin Peace, a classmate, and Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf, a teacher. Mention of the Buckendorf name sends Evelina’s grandfather, a rascally character named Mooshum, into a soliloquy about a certain historical incident. Mooshum, it turns out, was the only Indian caught but not murdered during the “rough justice” that followed the massacre. And Sister Mary Anita’s great-grandfather was a member of the lynching party. Evelina, trying to make sense of it all, draws up a chart: “I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw out elaborate spiderwebs of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil. There were a few people, one of them being Corwin Peace, whose chart was so complicated that I erased parts of it until I wore right through the paper.”

“The Plague of Doves” unfolds like a novelistic version of Evelina’s chart. The action bounces between Evelina; Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who sees the reservation’s dramas march through his courtroom; Marn Wolde, a tough local farm girl; and a final narrator whose name is too much of a plot spoiler to reveal.

The question of who really murdered that farm family adds suspense to the plot, but deeper, more satisfying discoveries arrive with the slow unspooling of the community’s bloodlines, with their rich and complex romantic entanglements. “The entire reservation is rife with conflicting passions,” Judge Coutts observes. “We can’t seem to keep our hands off one another, it is true, and every attempt to foil our lusts through laws and religious dictums seems bound instead to excite transgression.” Coutts, a rational man carrying on an irrational affair with a married woman, looks to philosophers like Marcus Aurelius for answers. “The only problem with those old philosophers,” he finds, “was that they didn’t give enough due to the unbearable weight of human sexual love.”

One of the risks of Erdrich’s multiple-narrator structure is that sometimes a narrator comes along who blows the rest of them off the page — and makes a reader wonder why on earth we’d ever return to those bores. Marn Wolde’s story, which chronicles the rise and fall of Billy Peace (young Corwin’s uncle), a charismatic cult leader, is a tour de force of sly comedy. As Billy’s wife, Marn finds herself trapped on his Branch Davidian-style compound with hilariously commonplace concerns about her bright young daughter, Lilith. “I thought she was terribly intelligent,” Marn says, “but there was no outside testing.” When Marn exited the novel, I felt like calling after her, “For the love of God, don’t leave now!”

In “A Plague of Doves,” Erdrich has created an often gorgeous, sometimes maddeningly opaque portrait of a community strangled by its own history. Pluto is one of those places we read about now and then when big-city papers run features about the death of small-town America. When you grow up in such a place, people know that your mother was a wild child back in high school. They know why your uncle talks to himself in the grocery store. What Erdrich knows is that this history, built up over generations, yields a kind of claustrophobia that has only one cure: Leave.

THE PLAGUE OF DOVES

By Louise Erdrich.

314 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95.

Bruce Barcott’s most recent book is “The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Rough Justice. Today's Paper|Subscribe